ABSTRACT
These extracts from the transcript of “Talking Writing” (Seagull), a very personal documentary, explore Mahasweta Devi’s special relationship with the lives that people her writing and the people that fuel her activism. In a series of conversations with her publisher and friend Naveen Kishore she revisits her life story – as a young woman writer trying to make her mark in a male-dominated publishing world, coming to age both as a wife and a mother, a relationship with her once-estranged son – and the story of a nation in the throes of a freedom struggle, the choice to actively oppose all injustice, to record through her journalism and fiction the less-than-human life of the tribals she spent all her life fighting for, and how this vital tapestry creates the terrain of her writing.
